# Scan stacks with QCard separator sheets

Interleave printed QCards in a paper stack and scan the whole pile at once — the rules that decide where documents split, the two scanning routes, and what the errors mean when a stack comes out wrong.

Product: content-central · Versions: 7.x · Audience: user · Time: 15 minutes · Last verified: 2026-09-05

Canonical: https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/scan-stacks-with-qcard-separator-sheets

**At the end of this guide you can hand the scanner a pile — QCard, pages, QCard, pages — and get back correctly separated, correctly indexed documents, because you know the three rules the splitter lives by.**

The idea: [generate QCards](/content-central/capture/create-and-print-qcards) for the documents in the stack, lay each one *on top of* its pages, and scan everything as one batch. Content Central finds the barcode sheets and splits the batch at each one; every document takes its instructions — catalog, type, field values, destination — from the QCard above it.

## The three rules

1. **The stack must begin with a QCard.** Pages before the first card have no instructions to follow — the whole file is set aside with a *Missing QCard* notice ("the file did not begin with a QCard").

2. **Everything after a QCard belongs to it, until the next QCard.** There's no page counting unless you asked for it — the next barcode sheet *is* the boundary. (A QCard generated with **Use fixed page count** splits every N pages instead, for stacks of uniform documents with one card up front.)

3. **Two QCards back-to-back is an error, not an empty document.** A card with no pages under it usually means two documents' cards got shuffled together — the batch is set aside rather than guessed at.

An **end-of-document QCard** (the **Include end-of-document QCard** option at generation time) adds a fourth, optional rule: it closes the current document explicitly, so trailing junk pages — the fax cover, the blank backside — can be kept out without a fresh card.

## Two ways to scan the stack

- **A scanner that saves to a folder** — the folder is watched by a [folder capture job](/content-central/capture/set-up-a-folder-capture-job) whose administrator set its **Document Descriptor** to **QCard** ("Image files… will be converted into documents. QCards determine the document boundaries."). Scan, walk away.
- **DirectScan** — scan the stack from [the DirectScan capture page](/content-central/capture/scan-documents-with-directscan). There's no QCard setting to enable there; interleaved QCards are recognized and honored automatically, on top of whatever you chose on the page itself.

## When a stack comes out wrong

| Symptom | What happened |
| --- | --- |
| Nothing arrived, and an *Unprocessed File Notification* went out | Rule 1 or 3 was broken — the batch was set aside intact for an administrator, in the system's Unprocessable folder |
| Two documents came out as one | The QCard between them was missed — usually a skewed, faint, or partially covered barcode; reprint and rescan that portion |
| A document has the wrong values | The wrong card was on top of it — the fix is a re-shuffle and rescan, or [field edits after filing](/content-central/documents/change-a-document-after-filing) |

> **IMPORTANT:** **Don't photocopy QCards.** The barcode is a pointer to *that card's* stored instructions — a copy of last month's card files this month's paper with last month's values. Cards are cheap; generate fresh ones.

**Success check:** build a small test stack — two QCards, a few pages each — and scan it. Two documents should arrive, each with its card's catalog, type, and values, and neither containing the other's pages.

## What's next

- [Create and print QCards](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/create-and-print-qcards)
- [Set up a folder (hot-folder) capture job](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/set-up-a-folder-capture-job)